posted by: Seth Nehil
photo by Jennifer Erickson
Based on the image in the TBA catalogue, I expected the “diverse materials” of the title to refer to physical objects. Maybe paint, paper or plastic… It was a pleasant surprise then to see Tiago, casually-dressed and in complete silence, entering the stage under the plain glow of white light. He then proceeded to carry out a series of mysterious actions, dance-like in their intentionality and symmetry, task-like in their direct and unadorned approach to the body. This silence of a full audience watching created an amplification of every movement, an attentive and perhaps uncomfortable desire to find the meaning behind these gestures. Clearly, there was purpose underneath.
After a few minutes, I started to notice patterns. Some magic is at work, giving logic to these movements. Yet their abstraction is pleasantly open. The “diverse materials” appear to be a library of meaningful human limbs – a meditative game of charades with no teams and no answers. The materials are drawn from a range of cultures: mudras, yogic postures, semaphores, positions of prayer, simple tasks. A sweet electronic song begins as Tiago lies down, and a moment later he leaves the the stage.
Entering again, each of the movements are repeated, but this time connected to physical materials. The repetition is not precise, not exact, but with a kind of memory at its heart. I hesitate to describe the performance in a step-by-step manner because the magic of these interactions is so simple. The way newsprint is gridded, the sound tape makes, the way white reflects light, the transparency of plastic, the way chairs become anthropomorphic. The humor of tiny things – the way spinning makes us dizzy, the way paintings always become landscapes, the way image-making can be macho. In the quietude of the theater, watching a single person move quietly on stage, a procession of activity and references emerges. All of this meaning is made possible by Tiago’s purposeful, graceful, elegant way of moving. Each gesture contains only as much as is needed. In the end, DIverse Materials is a celebration of the creative impulse – the mind’s habit of seeing shapes and metaphors in random matter, the desire to form that matter into something which reflects what we see, the body’s impulse to refine and make beautiful those tasks which transform.
